For most individuals, being aware of, and monitoring, the state of their finances and tracking their overall financial situation or “financial health” should be an extremely important and fundamental responsibility. Unfortunately, due to a lack of time, limits of currently available resources, and in some instances, a lack of motivation, many individuals have historically failed to recognize and accept this responsibility. However, recent economic events have reminded many individuals of the urgent need to know, and monitor, the state of their finances and financial health.
Several computing system implemented and/or on-line implemented financial management systems are currently available to help an individual, or an authorized user on behalf of an individual, gather an individual's own financial data and/or process/analyze that individual's own financial data. Typically, these currently available financial management systems provide an individual/user with financial data such as, but not limited to, the individual's overall financial position data, the individual's income data, the individual's expense data, and the individual's transactional data, all typically directed solely to the individual's own situation and/or activities. However, many individuals fail to take advantage of all the features offered by currently available financial management systems. This is often because of the individuals' unwillingness to devote the time and energy required to initially implement many of the features offered by currently available financial management systems and the often limited value of the resulting data reports/analysis.
One feature that is often under utilized by many actual, and potential, users of currently available financial management systems is the budgeting feature. This is because budgeting features available through currently available financial management systems not only typically require significant data entry and analysis by the user, but the budgets eventually provided are typically created based strictly on the individual's own historical spending, situation, activities, and/or stated goals. Consequently, budgeting features available through currently available financial management systems are often very time consuming and difficult to create, are largely created in isolation based solely on the user's own financial data, and often provide the user little or no guidance on how to start to budget their money and/or how their budgets compare with others.
Some currently available financial management systems provide users very limited and generalized financial statistics and/or recommendations/guidelines. However, using these currently available financial management systems, the user is typically required to provide significant data input and then, for their efforts, the user is often provided only highly generalized statistics and/or recommendations/guidelines that are typically of limited value to the user since they are often based on general spending assumptions and overly broad groupings that do not necessarily apply to the individual's specific financial situation, the individual's specific financial data, or the given individual's peers. Consequently, the currently available generalized “rule of thumb” statistics and/or budget recommendations/guidelines usually fail to provide the user/individual with any truly useful data, or the necessary motivation to modify their spending habits in order to establish more sound financial practices.
As a result of the situation described above, many individuals using currently available financial management systems do not make use of the budgeting features due to a lack of initial budgeting guidelines, the energy required to implement the budgeting features, and the limited value of the data provided by the currently available budgeting features. Consequently, using currently available financial management systems, individuals often fail to obtain the benefits of both a realistic budget and the comparative analysis and the “wisdom of the masses” that has become available with the advent of the Internet, improved processing power, and improved data storage.